


A Weeklong List of The Problems With Earth

by K0-36 (PreludeInZ)



Category: Power Rangers in Space
Genre: Gen, Loneliness, One Shot, anyway here's a shout out to my original favourite character in anything ever, gosh i love this sweet sad space boy, i don't know i'm just testing the waters here, modern auish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2019-04-06 19:42:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14064162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PreludeInZ/pseuds/K0-36
Summary: Concerning the indiscernible purpose of the so-called "Yankee Candle"





	A Weeklong List of The Problems With Earth

If he had a _week_ , he couldn’t list everything wrong with this planet.

(He doesn’t have a week, he has about an hour. He’s elected to spend that hour sitting alone on a bench across from a shop thats seems to sell jars of some unnamed combustible solid in a variety of colours. As far as he can tell from the bright illustrations in the windows, these are meant to be set on fire, to no immediately apparent purpose. He’s trying to decide whether or not he’ll sound like an idiot, if he decides to ask one of the others what exactly a “Yankee Candle” is supposed to be.)

(This is definitely one of the things that’s wrong with this planet, but it’s not very high on the list.)

For a start, they measure time in something as arbitrary and stupid sounding as _weeks_. Years, Andros understands. The definition of a unit of time according to the orbital period around a planet’s primary star— _that_ makes sense. The further subdivision of that period (year) according to consistent climatic changes caused by the axial tilt _of_ a planet over the course of that revolution—that’s logical too, so he understands about seasons. Why those seasons are an insufficient metric by which to subdivide the year is something he _doesn’t_ understand, because instead of sectioning the year evenly into quarters with respect to equinox and solstice, the primary Earth calendar divides the year into _twelve_ almost-but-not- _quite_ -exactly-equal units called months. Not even a respectable _ten_ , but _twelve_ , which is a ridiculous number of anything, when your species is physically adapted to the usage of base ten.

They might be human, but they’re not very _good_ at being human.

Andros is uncomfortably conscious of the fact that this probably isn’t fair.

After all, _he’s_ the one who was born on a colony planet, and _he’s_ been drifting alone and aimless through the universe with nothing better than a shipboard computer for company, for a period of time that he sometimes doesn’t like to quantify, whatever the unit is. One (1) Galactic Standard Exile. He’s been alone for ages, with nothing to attach time _to_ , besides the cycle of waking and sleeping and the distances in between star systems, a life lived in lightyears. The only things breaking up the monotony of perpetual flight are the occasional dicey skirmishes with forces that have him outmatched and outmaneuvered, and the pursuit of bits and scraps of hope that never turn out to be attached to anything substantial either. His new companions are the first thing like a positive change he’s experienced in ages, whether these ages are measured in days or weeks, months or years, parsecs or lightseconds.

The worst part is that this _should_ be good. This should be something he wanted, even if it was something he never could’ve expected or imagined, to be surprised aboard his ship by four strangers and a robot, and then _forced_ —by one of the aforementioned dicey skirmishes—into spontaneously recruiting a full corps of five Rangers. Good Rangers, even. Rangers who’ve been Rangers before, even if they’d only been Rangers planetside on their little backwater rock of a water-coated planetoid called Earth.

He should be _glad_. Five new allies with whom he shares a common goal. The recovery of a long lost component of his ship, cementing the _rightness_ of the fact that these people are Rangers, and that they’re _meant_ to be his comrades. Even captured and crippled and slowly dying, Zordon still seems determined to order the entire universe according to some master purpose, and apparently this is all part of it.

But, strictly speaking, Andros isn’t required to _like_ it.

Maybe he should’ve just kept the robot.

Zordon probably wouldn’t have liked that.

This train of thought only passes about five minutes worth of time, a bare twelfth of the hour he’s meant to occupy.

At least they have hours in common. Hours and minutes and seconds, maybe some long ago holdover from the first humans to leave Earth. This is a planet of his long-distant ancestors, but he doesn’t like to think about that.

Because so far, really, the worst thing about Earth is that it’s _like_ home, but it _isn’t_ home. It’s crowded and alive and thriving, like his very earliest memories of K035. Everything is human-shaped and human oriented and right and _familiar_ , but it only succeeds in making him homesick for a place that no longer exists. A place where his own people—not _these_ people—had screamed and wept, suffered and trembled, bled and died. When he closes his eyes against the brightness of the wrong star overhead, he can almost imagine himself back home, no longer a child, but the person he’d be if he’d been allowed to grow up. If there’d been peace. If home hadn’t burned.

And it just serves to remind him that they spend too much time here.

He’d tried to make the point that the difference between Space Rangers and planetary rangers is that you can’t _protect_ a planet if you’re always _on_ the planet, but it had come out colder and haughtier than he’d really meant it to, and he’d been outvoted, besides.

That’s a distinct disadvantage to gaining four new comrades. Nominally a corps of five operates as a loose democracy, and though Red might rank in command, there’s no such thing as power of veto. And where prior to now the only person he’s had to talk him out of anything is DECA— _now_ , he’s got four new voices with four different opinions, all falling all too frequently into line with one another. A treacherous little voice in his mind tries to tell him that this isn’t fair, but it’s too easy to know that for a selfish little lie, because it’s the very definition of fair.

These are the things he thinks about, left alone with an hour to wait, in the middle of a sprawling courtyard in a shopping center, while his newly minted comrades run an assortment of errands that he thinks are pointless and trivial, though he hasn’t said so. Purchasing clothing and food and trinkets and other assorted sundries, as though he doesn’t have a ship that can manufacture the basic essentials as necessary. As though personal possessions are a luxury afforded to Rangers. As though they can spare the time away from what their actual mission _is_ , and what they _should_ be doing.

Maybe he’ll go look at some Yankee Candles.


End file.
